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Posted
by
jamie
on Tuesday April 03, 2001 @11:10AMfrom the no-other-way-to-say-it dept.

Apologies for the AYB title, but that's just what everyone
is calling it.
Passport is
the central repository for your passwords and "personal information"
I've looked over the
Passport Terms of Use
and tried to give them the benefit of the doubt. But I can't
read it any other way than this. By "inputting data ...
or engaging in any other form of communication with or
through the Passport Web Site" -- or any of its
"associated services" -- you grant Microsoft the rights to
"use, modify, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly
display, publicly perform, reproduce, publish, sublicense,
create derivative works from, transfer, or sell any such
communication" and -- just when you were thinking it
couldn't get any worse -- "exploit any proprietary rights
in such communication, including but not limited to rights
under copyright, trademark, service mark or patent
laws." Am I wrong? Is that not what it means? And, is
Hotmail affected by this?

One of the key questions is what Microsoft means by
"associated services." The terms of use agreement applies to
"the Microsoft Passport Web Site" which they redefine in the
first sentence to mean "a Web site and its associated
services."

"The Passport Web Site may contain bulletin
board services, chat areas, news groups, forums,
communities, personal web pages, group calendars, electronic
mail postings and/or other message or communication
facilities designed to enable you to communicate with the
public at large or with a group (collectively,
'Communication Services')..."

That doesn't sound like a simple site for password- and
personal-data-storage to me.

The really big thing that everyone seems to be worried about is, how is Hotmail email affected by this? Here's the
Hotmail Terms of Use.
So is Hotmail an "associated service"? How would we know?
Passport is listed as one of Hotmail's "additional Microsoft
web sites and/or services"; what does that mean? If Hotmail
is associated with Passport, does that mean Passport is
associated with Hotmail? (Is "association" associative?)

Don't forget that
Passport
is a TRUSTe licensee.
TRUSTe stands 100% behind their privacy statement, so you
can really, really trust that All Your Bits Are Belong To
Us. (The joke is that TRUSTe doesn't actually guarantee you
any privacy. It supposedly guarantees that, if you can wade
through the legal mumbo-jumbo, you'll find yourself being
screwed in precisely the way that the lawyers tell you
you're being screwed.)

Here's a
directory
of the sites that use Passport for single-sign-in or purchasing.

You read it here first. Slashdot
predicted this
eight months ago. "Microsoft Passport And Your Privacy," July 29, 2000:
"...I'm sure Microsoft uses it as a user-tracking system more than
anything else." Go read
Joel's
article,
from eight months ago, in which he explains how Passport
"eliminates the last line of defense protecting your
privacy" and how Microsoft will "create a massive consumer
information database."

And finally, All Your Bits may be hard to retrieve once
they Belong To Us. jasonjwwilliams writes "After reading
about the new Hailstorm.net initiative by Microsoft, and how
once integrated with Passport.com, any communcations sent in
conjuction with the service in any manner becomes the
property of Microsoft, I asked Passport.com to remove me.
The response: we don't do that, wait 12 months to be
auto-removed. After three e-mails here's the bottom line I
received:

"Due to security reasons we do not allow nor do we have a
feature to delete Passport accounts. Rest assured that if
you do not access your account within 12 months our system
will automatically delete your account."

"I don't know about anyone else, but I think this is a
completely lame response and as far as I understand against
the law. Anyone know who to get a hold of? This is arrogance
gone too far."